Health Care: How the Democrats Are Shoring Up Their Ranks

By Karen Tumulty
Time
Washington Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009

With health reform's first test vote on the Senate floor less than 72 hours away, a platoon of top strategists — including pollsters Mark Mellman and Geoff Garin, incoming White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer and deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina — met with Democratic Senators Thursday afternoon to impress upon those who might be wavering that everyone's political fate is now joined with the success or failure of President Obama's top domestic priority.

Addressing the Senators over lunch in the Mansfield Room just off the chamber, Mellman quoted Benjamin Franklin: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." According to one person who was there, Mellman invoked memories of 1994, when the party lost control of both houses of Congress in the wake of its failure to enact Bill Clinton's health care initiative. And he noted that the chief casualties in that election had been moderates, many of whom had tried to distance themselves from the President. What Democrats will need more than anything else in this midterm-election season, Mellman said, is for Obama and his agenda to succeed.

The White House team also pledged whatever support the Senators might want, including visits to their states by Vice President Biden and making Administration officials available for interviews with home-state media. Some of the very tactics that helped get Obama elected, the team said, could be brought to bear now. Messina told them it will be important to achieve parity against the opposition on the airwaves, with paid advertising and surrogates; to overwhelm them with ground organization; and to "stand for something, go for it, and always play offense."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1941119,00.html